Witnesses say he drove around the gate trying to beat the train. I'm wondering whether the train was traveling at
Darwin Award finalist.
It's Amtrak, so it may be 2024 before you can Book a ticket to ride on an actual Revenue Train!
Lessons from SunRail: Drivers are surprised when a passenger rail is active at 'their' crossing. Rail crossings need the strongest possible markings, signals and quad gates especially when new passenger service begins. There's federal rail safety money to do that. The local DOT needs to get busy.
Yeah, it's up to the local governments to request the funds. Haven't heard of anyone implementing quad gates where it wasn't part of a "Quiet Zone" implementation, though.
Been tried before in other places. For many years there were train speed restrictions in numerous urban areas. Many were in areas where speeds would be low anyway, but some were very onerous. Generally the railroads tolerated them partly trying to be a good neighbor, and partly because they realized that there were numerous other areas that the various government entities could use to aggravate the situation. Finally, and I think it was in California one of the railroad companies took it to the Federal Courts and local speed limits were determined to be an interference with interstate commerce and therefore unconstitutional.
Why would that be the case? I suspect that the passenger demand analysis they did shows that there's sufficient demand between New Orleans and Mobile to justify the service. I could see that a connecting bus to Pensacola might be useful, but it's not critical to the success of this corridor. As for longer trips, I can't see how taking a bus from Jacksonville to Mobile, then transferring to the train would be competitive with just taking a through bus all the way from Jacksonville. And given the condition of the tracks east of Mobile, a New-Orleans-Jacksonville through train would be so much slower than a bus that it wouldn't be competitive at all.
I don’t know how many times we have to mention this, but NOL-JAX is at best on the back burner. It is in the long range plan of the Southern Rail Commission. But there is absolutely no project actively working on it. There are higher priority things to work on in Florida.
It was the opinion of OPUC officials when I worked for Oregon DOT that extreme train speed restrictions just encouraged motorists to try and beat trains.
NC has a good many crossings with quad gates and are not quiet zones. Downtown Greensboro, NC just west of the Amtrak station on Elm street is one example. Easy to see on Google Street view.
